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Science
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Myths of Geography
Is geography really destiny? Our maps may no longer be stalked by dragons and monsters, but our perceptions of the world are still shaped by geographic myths. Myths like Europe being the centre of the world. Or that border walls are the solution to migration. Or that Russia is predestined to threaten its neighbours. In his punchy and authoritative book, Paul Richardson challenges recent popular accounts of geographical determinism and shows that how we see the world represented often isn't how it really is - that the map is not the territory.
£12.99
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The Atomic Human
By contrasting our own (evolved, locked-in, embodied) intelligence with the capabilities of machine intelligence through history, 'The Atomic Human' reveals the technical origins, capabilities and limitations of AI systems, and how they should be wielded. Not just by the experts, but ordinary people. Either AI is a tool for us, or we become a tool of AI. Understanding this will enable readers to choose the future we want.
£12.99
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Love Triangle
What happens when you pull a pop song apart into pure sine waves and play it back on a piano? What did mathematicians have to do with the great pig stampede of 2012? The answer to each of these questions can be found in the triangle. Humans have been using triangles for thousands of years to build structures, measure the earth, make music, paint vanishing points, pot snooker balls and much, much more. But trigonometry is not a thing of the past - triangles underpin all of modern data technology. When someone Snapchats a photo, the light travels into the camera as electromagnetic sine waves, Fourier analysis compresses the image and then trigonometry is used to send the data to someone else's phone; when you listen to a track on Spotify, triangles remove the sounds which a human ear can't perceive and reassemble the song so that it's small enough to stream.
£12.99
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Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics
A husband-and-wife duo - he, a world-leading scientist; she, a writer - have come together to demystify the world's most important scientific theories.
£22.00
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sc
How does your brain decide what it's seeing, from the physical world to other people? For decades, scientists have tried to understand how our brains work, not realising that the answer lies much closer to home than it seems. The latest research in neuroscience and psychology suggests that the brain is doing the same thing that the scientists are: using past experiences to build theories of how the world works, and using these models to predict and make sense of it. Through this process, your brain constructs the reality that you live in. In this book Daniel Yon takes the research one step further, uncovering how your brain colours your perception of the world, the judgements you make about other people and the beliefs you form about yourself. With transformative applications for how we engage with other communities and approach mental illness, 'A Trick of The Mind' will revolutionise the way you think.
£22.00
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Adventures in Fermentation
Imagine a world without bread, butter or wine. Without soy sauce or chocolate. What if we also take away cheese, coffee and even antibiotics? This is what life without fermentation would be like. Fermentation is so much more than a current health trend, it has shaped the world we live in, the bodies we inhabit, the staple foods we eat and even has the potential to shape our future. 'Adventures in Fermentation' is a tantalising journey into the weird and wonderful world of fermentation, from its role in our evolution to the foods we love and everything in between.
£20.00
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Alive
What does it mean to live in a body? For Gabriel Weston, there was always something missing from the anatomy she was taught at medical school. Medicine teaches us how a body functions, but it doesn't help us navigate the reality of living in one. As she became a surgeon, a mother, and ultimately a patient herself, Weston found herself grappling with the gap between scientific knowledge and unfathomable complexity of human experience. In this captivating exploration of the body, Weston dissolves the boundaries that usually divide surgeon and patient, pushing beyond the limit of what science has to tell us about who we are.
£20.00
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Alien earths
For thousands of years, humans have wondered whether we're alone in the cosmos. Now, for the first time, we have the technology to investigate. The question should have an obvious answer: yes or no. But once you try to find life elsewhere, you realize it is not so simple. How do you find it over cosmic distances? What actually is life? As founding director of Cornell University's Carl Sagan Institute, astrophysicist Lisa Kaltenegger built a team of tenacious scientists from many disciplines to create a uniquely specialized toolkit to find life on faraway worlds. In 'Alien Earths', she demonstrates how we can use our homeworld as a Rosetta Stone, creatively analyzing Earth's history and its astonishing biosphere to inform this search.
£10.99
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Quantum leaps
How does Google know what you want to type? How did humans first reach the moon? Could we ever have a supercomputer the size of a pinhead? In this thrilling numerical journey, Hugh Barker explores how mathematics has helped to build the technology of today, and the fascinating ways it is shaping the future. From green energy to 3-D printing and from quantum cryptography to machine learning, 'Quantum Leaps' reveals the hidden mathematics in modern technology.
£10.99
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The power of words
Discover the transformative power of words and elevate your conversations with this profound and inspiring international bestseller, written by renowned Argentinian neuroscientist Mariano Sigman.
£10.99
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Code dependent
A riveting and revealing exploration of the world created by computer algorithms and its impact on individuals, from the workers across the globe who feed artificial intelligence systems with data to the impact of algorithms on our own behaviour, as consumers and citizens.
£10.99
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The immune mind
Delving into the recent discovery of the brain's immune system, Dr Monty Lyman reveals the extraordinary implications for our physical and mental health.
£10.99
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What if? 2
What if you still had so many more strange questions about the universe? And what if Randall Munroe, former NASA roboticist and xkcd creator, were prepared to move mountains, fill the solar system with soup and alter the space-time continuum to answer them? Whether it's how to make a lava lamp out of lava or feeding the inhabitants of New York to a T. Rex, welcome to the weird, wonderful (and sometimes terrifying) world of 'What If? 2'.
£12.99
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How life works
Drawing on recent discoveries and insights, How Life Works outlines a new vision of our understanding of life for the 21st century.
£14.99
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Our accidental universe
The BBC presenter of 'Sky at Night', and Gresham Professor of Astronomy, Chris Lintott, takes us on an astonishing tour of bizarre accidents, big characters, and human error to tell the story of some of the most important astronomical events of the past hundred years.
£11.99
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Much ado about numbers
What's the connection between Shakespeare and maths? A lot, as it turns out! Shakespeare grew up in a time of remarkable mathematical innovation. From astronomy to probability, music to multiplication, new mathematical ideas were taking off - and much of this was reflected in his work. In this book, Rob Eastaway explores the surprising and entertaining ways that maths and numbers crop up in Shakespeare's plays.
£10.99
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Nostalgia
A dazzling history of a dangerous emotion, by acclaimed historian Agnes Arnold-Forster.
£10.99
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Webb's universe
With mind-blowingly detailed images from the world's most powerful telescope, Webb's Universe reveals the depths of our cosmos in all its beauty.
£25.00
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Why we die
A major exploration of the science of why and how we age and die - from a Nobel Prize-winning biologist and former president of the Royal Society.
£12.99
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Landscapes of silence
This is a work about silences. And land. Renowned anthropologist and film-maker Hugh Brody weaves a dazzling tapestry of personal memory and distant landscapes: childhood in England in the shadow of the Second World War, the Derbyshire hills, a kibbutz in Israel and the deep Canadian Arctic. Growing up on the outskirts of Sheffield, Hugh Brody ate roast beef and Yorkshire pudding but was always given to understand that the real, the perfect food came from his mother's home, Vienna. He attended Hebrew classes three times each week but was sent off to a Church of England boarding school. Conflicted and bewildered, he sought places to which he could escape - but everywhere he discovered deep and troubling silences. He takes us on his first journeys to the Arctic, a world so far removed from anything he had known as to be a chance to learn, all over again, what it can mean to be alive.
£12.99
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The city of today is a dying thing
Cities are bad for us: polluted, noisy and fundamentally unnatural. We need green space, not concrete. Trees, not tower blocks. So goes the argument. But is it true? What would the city of the future look like if we tried to build a better life from the ground up? And would anyone want to live there? Here, Des Fitzgerald takes us on an urgent, unforgettable journey into the future of urban life, from shimmering edifices in the Arizona desert to forest-bathing in deepest Wales, and from rats in mazes to neuroscientific studies of the effects of our surroundings. Along the way, he reveals the deep-lying and often controversial roots of today's green city movement, and offers an argument for celebrating our cities as they are - in all their raucous, constructed and artificial glory.
£9.99
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The meteorite hunters
Join the scientists hunting down the world's rarest rocks - and the secrets within.
£18.99
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Our moon
Every living being throughout history, across time and geography, has gazed up at the same moon. It has inspired scientific discovery and culture from the ancient astronomers to the scientific revolution of Copernicus and Galileo, from the 1969 Apollo landings to writers and artists, and stirred an inexhaustible desire to know where we come from and how we got here. And as astronauts around the world prepare to return to the Moon - opening up new frontiers of discovery, profit and politics - 'Our Moon' tells the dazzling story of how the Moon has shaped life as we know it, fuelled dramatic change across the globe and could be the key to humanity's future.
£12.99
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How AI thinks
Artificial intelligence is revolutionising sectors from education to healthcare to the creative arts. But how does AI understand sentiment or context? How does it play and win games that have an almost infinite number of moves? And how can we work with AI to produce insights and innovations that are beyond human capacity, from writing code in an instant to unfolding the elaborate 3D puzzles of proteins? Nigel Toon shows how we train AI to train itself, so that it can paint images that have never existed before or converse in any language.
£10.99
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